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I received my MA in philosophy of science many years ago and currently reviving my academic interests. I hope to stimulate individuals in the realms of science, philosophy and the arts...to provide as much free information as possible.

Saturday, November 10, 2012

Philip Roth to retire

American novelist announced his retirement in October in little-noticed interview with French magazine

by

Ben Quinn

November 9th, 2012

guardian.co.uk

Philip Roth, the US novelist widely regarded as America's best hope of ending a 20 year drought without a winner of the Nobel prize for literature, has said that he is calling it a day.

The writer announced his retirement in a little-noticed interview with a French magazine and said that Nemesis, which was published in 2010, would be his last book.

"To tell you the truth, I'm done," Roth told Les Inrocks last month, adding that he had not written anything for the past three years.

Having reached the age of 79, he realised that he was running out of years and had chosen to reread his favourite novels, as well as his own books.

"I wanted to see if I had wasted my time writing," he said, according to a translation from the French by Salon.

"And I thought it was rather successful. At the end of his life, the boxer Joe Louis said: 'I did the best I could with what I had.' This is exactly what I would say of my work: I did the best I could with what I had."

Roth said that he had dedicated his life to the novel, to the exclusion of almost everything else.

"Enough is enough! I no longer feel this fanaticism to write that I have experienced in my life," he said.

The son of a Jewish-American family from Newark, New Jersey, Roth made his literary debut in 1959 with Goodbye, Columbus, but it was his 1969 novel, Portnoy's Complaint, that brought him international attention due to its graphic depiction of sexuality.

Roth has recently turned his attentions towards trying to persuade Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopaedia, to let him adjust an inaccurate description of his novel, The Human Stain.

He wrote an open letter to Wikipedia in September after it refused to accept him as a credible source for the inspiration behind the book.

However, during the summer his literary track record was recognised when he won Spain's prestigious Prince of Asturias prize.

The work of Roth, already the recipient of the Man Booker international prize, the Pulitzer and the National Book award, was described by the Asturias judges as forming "part of the great American novel, in the tradition of Dos Passos, Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Bellow and Malamud".

The jury said Roth's "characters, events and plots form a complex view of contemporary reality torn between reason and feeling, such as the sign of the times and the sense of unease about the present", and praised his "literary quality, [which] is displayed in his fluid, incisive writing".

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Annus mirabilis-1905 March is a time of transition winter and spring commence their struggle between moments of ice and mud a robin appears heralding the inevitable life stumbling from its slumber it was in such a period of change in 1905 that the House of Physics would see its Newtonian axioms of an ordered universe collapse into a new frontier where the divisions of time and space matter and energy were to blend as rain and wind in a storm that broke loose within the mind of Albert Einstein where Brownian motion danced seen and unseen, a random walk that became his papers marching through science reshaping the very fabric of the universe we have come to know we all share a common ancestor a star long lost in the eons of memory and yet in that commonality nature demands a permutation a perchance genetic roll of the dice which births a new vision lifting us temporarily from the mystery exposing some of the roots to our existence only to raise a plethora of more questions as did the papers of Einstein in 1905